The Plot for America: Remembering Civil Rights Leader Joachim Prinz

Joachim Prinz speaking at the March on Washington, August 28, 1963.
(Courtesy Lucie Prinz)

I.

On the evening of June 26, 1937, thousands of Berlin Jews packed the city’s grand Brüdervereinshaus to bid farewell to Rabbi Joachim Prinz, who had been ordered by the Gestapo to leave Germany immediately or face an almost certain death sentence for political subversion. Prinz had been the most popular, outspoken, and inspirational champion of Jewish national rights and Zionism in the dark years since the Nazis’ rise to power, preaching to overflow crowds at Berlin’s most important temples about the need to leave Germany and immigrate to Palestine. By the summer of 1937 he had already been arrested a half-dozen times by the Gestapo, but he always managed to elude deportation. This time, however, he was warned by his “friend” and informant, Gestapo Obersturmbanführer Kuchman, that his days were numbered, and he reluctantly decided to emigrate to the United States, sponsored by his friend and patron Rabbi Stephen S. Wise. Among the uninvited guests at Prinz’s farewell was a Nazi functionary, Adolf Eichmann.

Eichmann’s presence was to have important legal ramifications more than two decades later. In the initial discovery proceedings to establish Eichmann’s identity before his 1961 trial in Jerusalem, Benno Cohen, the foremost Zionist leader in pre-war Berlin, positively identified the defendant, testifying as follows:

We held a valedictory meeting to take leave of Rabbi Dr. Joachim Prinz who was leaving the country. He was one of the finest speakers, the best Zionist propagandist in those years. The large hall was packed full. The public thronged to this meeting. Suddenly, as chairman of the event, I was called to the door and my office clerk told me, “Mr Eichmann is here.” I saw this same man, for the first time in civilian clothing, and he shouted at me, “Who is responsible for order here? This is disorder of the first degree.” … I watched him the entire time from my place in the chair.

As a young rabbi in his late twenties, Prinz was already addressing congregations of thousands in Berlin’s largest temple, the magnificent Neue Synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse, whose stunning façade has recently been restored. And less than two years after arriving in the United States after his expulsion from Germany by Eichmann’s goons, he was appointed rabbi of New Jersey’s largest Jewish house of worship, the magnificent Greek Revival Temple B’nai Abraham, which towered over Newark’s then-fashionable and heavily Jewish Clinton Hill section, where hundreds of young people swarmed to hear his Friday-night orations.

As Prinz so evidently delights in repeatedly recalling in his posthumously published memoir, Rebellious Rabbi, the Jews of both Berlin and Newark—especially “the younger generation” to whom he mainly dedicated his ministries—did not so much “go to shul” for an encounter with the divine as they “went to Prinz” for an encounter with the rabbi. The combination of Prinz’s charismatic personality and his distinctly un-theological and nationalistic understanding of the essence of Judaism proved as attractive to the nervously Americanizing Jews of mid-20th-century New Jersey as it had been to the deeply assimilated and newly imperiled Jews of early Nazi Germany. Prinz’s nationalist theology was first expressed in his classic work of Jewish defiance, Wir Juden, which was published in Berlin in 1934 and quickly became a best-seller among Germany’s deeply demoralized Jews. He used his experiences leading the Jews of Nazi Berlin to develop an almost metaphysical notion of Jewish national identity, which he referred to as the “doctrine of Jewish inescapability.”

Prinz’s initial, exploratory visit to the United States, in March 1937, just a half year before his final emigration from Germany, was marked by all manner of disappointments with the “Golden Land.” Prinz complained bitterly about America’s complacence in the face of the threat posed by Nazi Germany. In his first recorded impressions of the country, he found almost nothing that compared favorably with his native Germany. America’s cities are depicted as ugly and rundown, racism against blacks disturbingly pervasive, its political culture naïve and intellectual life second-rate, and its people primitive and poorly dressed.

“My first impression with America was dreadful,” he wrote. Prinz arrived in Hoboken and described the scene as “not impressive, the houses were decrepit and the streets were dirty. The richest country in the world did not present itself to me as a place of glamour and prosperity.”

But, already during this first visit, Prinz was inspired by an unexpected section of New York—Harlem. “I remember being particularly interested in Harlem,” he wrote. “It was at that time that I heard for the first time what is now commonplace, namely speeches about Black Nationalism. Upon my return to Germany I wrote an article that was entitled ‘Zionism in Black.’ ”

And in June 1937, shortly before he finally emigrated with his family to the United States, Prinz published a stinging indictment of American racism, “Ámerika, hast du es besser?” in the Berlin liberal Jewish journal Der Morgen: “When people in New York City describe a neighborhood as being nice, they are not referring to its parks, trees or wide boulevards. They are talking about the fact that there are no blacks, Italians and Jews in that ‘nice’ part of the city.”

Prinz’s brave defiance of the Nazis, and his understanding of Jewish identity in primarily national, if not quite racial, terms, emboldened him to speak his mind when he encountered all forms of racism in the United States after he immigrated in August 1937. During his first foray outside New Jersey, to Atlanta, where he had been invited to address various Jewish organizations just three months after his arrival in the country, Prinz came face-to-face with Southern Jewish racism. Before his first engagement, speaking to members of the local Zionist leadership, Prinz scheduled a morning meeting with the Bible scholar and black Methodist bishop Willis Jefferson King, at the time professor of Old Testament at Gammon Theological Seminary, a black institution. Upon arriving in Atlanta, while making his way to King’s home, Prinz noticed a huge Coca-Cola sign, which at that time constituted Atlanta’s skyline, as the beverage company was the city’s largest business. Here is Prinz’s remarkable recollection of the subsequent events of that day:

After I left the Seminary, it was time for me to go and address a luncheon given in my honor by three Zionist groups. I was greeted by the people in charge of the affair and shortly thereafter one of them said to me, “I hear that you visited that nigger at the black seminary and even invited the nigger to dine with you tonight.” I was completely speechless. But I managed to respond that it was true that I visited with a great scholar and had a very interesting time with him. But I could not help adding that I was shocked to hear such words from a Jewish group welcoming a Hitler refugee. … I asserted that what was evidently happening to the black people of America was the very same thing that was happening to the Jews of Europe. There was an embarrassed silence … after which one of the Jews asked me: “Would the rabbi care for a drink?” … I immediately responded that I would like nothing better, hoping for a stiff alcoholic drink, not merely intoxicating but anaesthetizing for a pain I can hardly describe. Someone then brought me a glass of Coca Cola. That was the first time, and the very last time in my life that I drank Coca Cola. In all the forty years that have elapsed since 1937, Coca Cola was for me a symbol of hatred and prejudice with which I did not want to be identified.

Prinz could hardly have imagined at the time that more than a quarter of a century later he was to share these very same sentiments with what was to become the largest audience he, or any other American rabbi, was ever to address—the quarter of a million people who gathered on the National Mall for the “March on Washington for Jobs” on August 28, 1963, a historic event that Prinz often referred to in subsequent speeches and writings as the “most memorable religious experience of my life,” and of which he was one the principle organizers.

Following a stirring rendition of “I’ve Been Buked and Scorned” by the so-called Queen of Gospel, Mahalia Jackson (Prinz, clearly moved by Jackson’s performance, prefaced his speech by declaring, “I wish I could sing!”) and speaking just prior to Dr. King’s legendary “I Have a Dream” oration, Prinz mesmerized the marchers with a speech that was as bold as it was brief, and as inspiring as it was passionate. Opening with the words “I speak to you as an American Jew,” Prinz launched a powerful indictment of American silence in the wake of that era’s violent racism in the Deep South, an apathy that he controversially compared to the silence of “ordinary Germans” during the early years of the Third Reich.

(Curious about Prinz’s proud vow of cola abstinence, I’d contacted Prinz’s son, Rabbi Jonathan Prinz, who confirmed that Coca-Cola was not allowed in the Prinz family home. But he added a literally refreshing footnote. The day of the March on Washington was especially hot and humid, the younger Rabbi Prinz recalled. His father was parched after the speeches and joined other members of the roster at a VIP tent at the front of the Mall, in search of a cool beverage; to his dismay, the only drink available was Coca-Cola, which both rabbis Prinz happily consumed with great gusto.)

Joachim Prinz, two to the left of Martin Luther King, in the Oval Office with President John F. Kennedy and other Civil Rights leaders on the day of the March on Washington.(Cecil W. Stoughton via John F. Kennedy Library)

As his personal correspondence from the late 1950s indicates, Prinz was the first rabbi to reach out to Martin Luther King Jr. When Prinz was installed as President of the American Jewish Congress at its May 1958 convention in Miami, King was—at Prinz’s insistence—the keynote speaker. It was the first time the civil rights leader had ever addressed a white audience south of the Mason-Dixon line. Less than two years later, King addressed an overflow crowd from Prinz’s pulpit at B’nai Abraham in Newark, New Jersey’s most prestigious Jewish pulpit.

Prinz’s activism was widely criticized, and it must be said not entirely unreasonably, by neo-conservative Jewish intellectuals such as Milton Himmelfarb and Norman Podhoretz, and even more so by many conservative members of his own congregation. These members were especially troubled by what they derided as his public Civil Rights “stunts”; when, for example, in 1960, he organized and led the picket line in front of Woolworth’s flagship Manhattan store on Fifth Avenue to protest the store’s segregated lunch counters in the South. Prinz, who helped the Jews of Berlin withstand the Nazis’ anti-Jewish boycotts, regularly used his bully pulpit as the president of the AJC to urge boycotts of several major national department stores: Woolworth’s, Kress’s, Kresge’s, and Grant’s among them, issuing a statement on March 25, 1960, that proclaimed in the name of the AJC, “We do not accept the thesis that businesses may solicit the patronage of Negro customers in all other departments and deny them the right to equal service in the consumption of food and beverage. … We therefore support the call [to boycott] and add our voice.”

While the large majority of American Jewish leaders were growing cold toward the cause due to the rise of radical black identity politics that were inflected with no small degree of anti-Semitism, Prinz’s commitment, and his sense of personal affinity with the black experience in America, never waned, even after he was held up at knife-point by a black hitch-hiker he picked up while driving to Shabbat services at B’nai Abraham. (Prinz loved to recall that upon first seeing the knife pointed at his throat, he solemnly informed his assailant, “Young man, I’ll have you know that I marched with Dr. King,” to which his assailant responded, “Look, man, I don’t give a fuck who your doctor is; just give me your damn money!”) and later mugged by an intruder in his own office at B’nai Abraham.

Largely because of his insistence on not abandoning the deteriorating city, B’nai Abraham remained the last of Newark’s major synagogues to relocate to the suburbs west of the city, finally moving in 1973 to Livingston, where it thrives to this day. Newark’s leading Reform Temple, B’nai Jeshurun, led by the highly respected Rabbi Ely Pilchik, had already relocated in 1968 to a magnificent, indeed ostentatious, new building on a hilltop overlooking the suburb of Short Hills, a grand structure that featured a soaring pointed steeple. A few of Prinz’s congregants decided that showing Prinz this impressive new building might help convince him that B’nai Abraham ought to abandon Newark for a glorious future in the suburbs. Upon driving by B’nai Jeshurun and gazing up at the synagogue’s towering steeple, Prinz quipped that this was “Pilchik’s final erection.”

Prinz was especially embittered by his fellow rabbis’ abandonment of the Civil Rights cause. He concluded his keynote address to the 1970 national convention of the Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly—although Prinz was trained at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau, Germany, as a Conservative rabbi, he removed B’nai Abraham from the conservative movement, declaring the congregation, and himself, “independent”—by upbraiding the more than 250 rabbis present, and American Jews more generally, for having “retreated back into their own Jewish ghetto” abandoning what he continued to insist was an essentially Jewish moral cause:

Less and less do the lists of the peace movements and the movements of urban reform and those crying out against injustice and inequality for the Black community contain Jewish names. Most of the people, particularly you rabbis, have withdrawn into their comfortable ghettos. Instead of leading the people, you are following. Jews are among the most bigoted people in the world. Jewish leadership, instead of reprimanding them for it and cursing them up and down, as did the ancient Prophets, has followed their ranks.

II.

Prinz’s identification with the plight of African Americans was inextricably bound with his own passionate, life-long commitment to Zionism. The earliest stirrings of black pride in America obviously touched a sensitive personal nerve in Prinz, whose road to Jewish religion and Zionism was a rocky one resisted by his grandfather, father, and hometown rabbi, just as civil rights was for many of the young black pioneers of the movement, who, especially in the deep south, rebelled against the long complacency of their elders. As he recalls in his memoir:

My Jewish emptiness, which was caused by the perfunctory and assimilationist Jewish attitude of my community, including my own father, left a void inside me that made me search for something to fill it. It was at that time that I began to discover that there was something in Jewish life that was new, but rejected by the vast majority of the Jewish people. It was the Zionist movement. I ordered Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State from our bookstore, since the library of the Jewish community did not carry it. I read it feverishly, including the last sentence: “If you will it, it will not be a fairy tale.” … In speaking with my rabbi about it he warned me against such a foolish idea that could only lead to a Jewish disaster and create … a betrayal of the German patriotism to which we were all wedded.

Prinz recalls his father having a slice of ham with breakfast each day and describes him as “a great patriot and believer in Germany … an assimilated Jew to whom Zionism was anathema, who was religiously very mixed up … but aware of my oratorical talents.” When his father lay ill, mistakenly believing that he was on his deathbed (the most Jewish thing about the elder Prinz appears to have been that he was seriously psychosomatic), he asked Joachim to take a solemn oath swearing never to become a rabbi. In one of the memoir’s very few examples of conceding to the beliefs, or even sensitivities, of another human being, Prinz, with fingers crossed behind his back, obliged, “knowing that I was lying to him.”

Prinz, like many other famous Central European Jewish intellectuals of the interwar era—from Franz Kafka to Gershom Scholem—bristled at and rebelled definitively against their fathers’ and grandfathers’ assimilation. The experience of ministering over the return of deeply alienated and assimilated German Jews to their Jewish roots during the Nazi era not only deepened Prinz’s Zionist convictions but also shaped his thinking about the one unshakable belief that permeated his preaching and writings for the remainder of his life—the idea of the “inescapable” nature of Jewish identity. Though they might be able physically to hide their national identity in a way America’s blacks could not, all Jews—no matter how determined or desperate to escape it—were bound together by an inescapable destiny.

Aside from his Jewish identity, there was another matter that Rabbi Prinz seemed, at least personally, to find utterly inescapable: the male sexual drive. In his memoirs, Prinz repeatedly expressed disdain for the idea of monogamy. In the course of his overly lengthy and explicit recollections of his premarital sexual adventures, including those with the woman who was to become his first wife, Lucie (whom Prinz offers was sexually “very well trained and far superior to me,” having “herself invented” certain coital techniques previously unknown to humankind), there is the following description of their adolescent loss of innocence, which even Woody Allen might find too absurd to keep in a script: “I remember the first time we slept together was after a long walk through the woods, and our bed was the field. The moon was shining brightly, the stars were above us, and I thought of Kant’s famous line in his Critique of Pure Reason in which he discussed the relationship of moon, stars and the moral conscience.”

Joachim Prinz and other Civil Rights leaders at the Lincoln Memorial for the March on Washington.National Archives

Prinz’s second wife, Hilde, whom he predeceased by six years and with whom he by all accounts, including his own, enjoyed a wonderful marriage, is also not spared. In his recollection of their honeymoon on a freighter bound for Italy, Prinz offers the following passage, which, as always, offers an exalted literary reference in connection with the act of coitus: “Hilde, young and pretty and I, young and handsome, spent a fantastic time on the boat which, of course, had much influence on the sex, helped along by the movement of the ocean. It reminded us of the poem dealing with the waves of the sea and the movement of the heart.”

Such evidence of Prinz’s taste for great sex and great writing—best experienced in mutual climax—might explain the fact that he alone among America’s leading rabbis was a very early admirer of Newark’s most notorious Jewish son, Philip Roth. While Roth’s sensational debut works, Goodbye Columbus in 1959 and, a decade later, Portnoy’s Complaint, earned him the immediate scorn of America’s most prestigious rabbis, and Roth’s name became synonymous with a particularly shmutzig form of Jewish self-loathing, Prinz was energetically promoting him. Prinz sponsored Roth’s first trip to Israel, in 1963, as part of the “Encounters” conferences that he organized as president of the American Jewish Congress, at which Roth appeared on a panel with Leslie Fiedler and the celebrated Israeli writer Aharon Megged.

History has not been terribly kind to Joachim Prinz; he has all but been forgotten, and he has not been the subject of a single scholarly study or biography. But his support of Philip Roth at the dawn of his literary career, utterly unique among his clerical contemporaries, has not gone unrewarded, resulting in his exposure to a vastly larger popular readership than that ever enjoyed by a rabbi, let alone a Jewish historian.

Rabbi Joachim Prinz emerges as the great Jewish hero and main opponent of the nefarious Jewish quisling of America’s fascist President Lindbergh, Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf, toward the end of Roth’s counter-historical novel, The Plot Against America. While Bengelsdorf is a fictional character, all the other rabbis who appear in the novel are historical figures, including Prinz’s most prominent colleagues in the Newark rabbinate. But, as is always the case in Roth’s writings, his portrait of these rabbis is more than a bit miserable—except for that of Joachim Prinz, who is the only one of the lot to stand up both to the Lindbergh Administration and to Rabbi Bengelsdorf, whose daughter’s wedding, alone among Newark’s rabbis, he boycotts. Roth writes, “Rabbi Prinz’s authority among Jews throughout the city, in the wider Jewish community, and among scholars and theologians of every religion had far exceeded his elder colleagues, and it is he alone of the rabbis leading the city’s tree wealthiest congregations who never flinched in his opposition to Lindbergh.”

And so when, in the novel, Newark’s Jews fear a pogrom, similar to those spreading like prairie fires across America, it is Prinz who rises to their defense by establishing the government-sanctioned Committee of Concerned Jewish Citizens—in unofficial tandem with his friend Longy Zwillman’s creation of an illicit Jewish militia that roams the Jew-lined streets of Weequahic and Clinton Hill. (Zwillman was in fact a member of B’nai Abraham, and Prinz officiated at his mob cohorts’ weddings and at Zwillman’s funeral.) The novel’s young protagonist imagines the murderous flood of anti-Semitic violence that would have overcome Newark’s Jews were it not for Prinz:

a nightmarish vision of America’s anti-Semitic fury roaring Eastward and surging onto Liberty Avenue straight into our alleyway and on up our back stairs like the water of a flood, had it not been for the sturdy barrier presented by the gleaming bay haunches of the horses of the Newark Police force, whose strength and speed and beauty Newark’s preeminent rabbi, the nobly named Prinz, had caused to materialize at the end of our street.

While ostensibly fictional, Roth’s projection of Prinz’s role in his nightmarish vision of the fate of Newark’s Jews in fascist America is perfectly consistent with the historical record of Prinz’s career, which Roth knew well. Indeed, the theme of one of Prinz’s earliest sermons at B’nai Abraham was a fierce denunciation of American fascism, during which he aimed particularly sharp jabs at Charles Lindbergh, Henry Ford, and their racist acolytes. Alas, rabbis of Prinz’s intellectual caliber, clarity of vision, and courage survive today almost only in the world of fiction.

***

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Allan Nadler, a professor of religious studies and director of the program in Jewish Studies at Drew University, is currently a visiting professor of Jewish Studies at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

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This articles is slightly distorted. Let’s take the case of Newark. The remaining Jews in Newark fled for their lives following the afro-american riots in 1967. Some of the riots had an unmistakable anti-Semitic undertone. There was a feeling among many Jews that although they supported the civil rights movement there was little or no reciprocity from the Afro-American community for issues that were important to American Jews such as support for Israel. This remains true to this day where there is very little support for Israel from Afro-Americans even though Israel is the only Western country who actively brought Africans into their country and have provided them with support ever since (more or less successfully) and many Arab countries are extremely racist.

Thank you Alan for this wonderful, lively and completely accurate story about my father. You caught his fervor, his passions (of all sorts) and his love of life which he translated into his support for those who did good works. He harnessed his talents for public speaking both in his sermons and in speeches like the one at the March on Washington in the service of causes that were often unpopular and, in Germany dangerous to espouse. When I thanked Philip Roth for his portrayal of my father in THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA, he said: “I only gave him the words he would have spoken in real life.”
He taught his children to stand up to the forces of bigotry and injustice whenever we encounter them. This is his legacy to us and it continues to inform our lives.
And, by the way, what a wonderful web site. I’m a new fan.

Thank you, Tablet and Allan Nadler – Your article was magnificent and compelling personal, Zionist, civil rights, Jewish and American story. It stirred legacy reminders for young and old of our powerful, authentic and complex Jewish “Tikun Olam” roots and wings. May the life, ideals, complexities and accomplishments of Yoachim Prinz z”l be an inspiration and blessing in our continuous fight against the assimilation of our Jewish identity and values.

Prinz and his Wise mentor were consistently self aggrandizing. Self righteous egomaniacs loom large in their lifetime with radio access and publicity. The most interesting nugget in this obituary is Eichmann’s presence at Prinz’ farewell. Eichmann is remembered by history.

When B’nai Abraham was in its final years in Newark, I was fortunate enough to teach at its Hebrew School. And yes, The elder Rabbi Prinz, was an egomaniac. I wish we had some egomaniacs just like Rabbi Prinz now…when we need him again.

That remark by “Prince”– especially the quip about Eichmann — is truly beneath contempt, and undeserving of a response. Rabbis Steven Wise and Prinz, of blessed memory — and, I may add Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, z”l (also an egomaniac)– did more to advance Zionism in America than anyone other than Justice Louis Brandeis. Shame on you, “prince.” This is a magnificent and well-earned tribute to a great man egomaniac or not.

In trying to understand both Berlin and Hoboken, NJ during the years 1936 – 1937 – this article was ‘manna’ from heaven for me personally ! And, I thank Mr. Nadler for putting it together. I think it is important to remember that Rabbi Prinz was a German through and through based on the quote: , “Ámerika, hast du es besser?” By that I mean his attention to detail and confidence in what he what he thought and believed.

Dave Bosthorn,
It says what all ?
What kind of silly, cynical remark is that ?
Newark was a major Jewish community before the racial unrest and riots. It had more than 60 synagogues and produced many important Jewish scholars and writers, Philip Roth only the most famous among them. Prinz was also the president of the American Jewish Congress for many years, and a national Jewish leader.
I can only imagine you’re the worst kind of provincial New Yorker; one who believes the only Jewish world that matters, ends on the Hudson and East Rivers. This fascinating tribute to a major Jewish leader, instead of opening your vistas, manages only to evoke your blindness. Thank you Tablet, and Rabbi Nadler, for a lovely and well-deserved tribute to an inspiring, and sadly neglected, Jewish hero.

Glen Beck’s persecution of George Soros has been met with late and tepid response from the Jewish community. Why? Because Beck and his like-minded American fascists (sure, he’s trying to co-opt that word by using it indiscriminately and inappropriately on HIS detractors, but those who know its definition are not fooled) — all of them are PRO-Israel.

Funny about that — how fascism can hide in all kinds of funny places. But because Beck and his lot are so successful at this, the likes of the Koch Brothers are able to wage their war against real democracy, and no one from the Jewish community says a word about it.

I wonder what Prinz would make our weird present-day dichotomies. I think he would have made the correct distinctions and spoken out loud and clear against the manipulation of the masses. We need such a voice of honesty and clarity now.

I wonder what Prinz would make of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians in the occupied territories. I don’t have to wonder. He would condemn the inhumanity without regard to its popularity. Too bad he isn’t around to help save Israel from itself.

I was priveledged to hear Rabbi Prinze speak many times at his B’nai Abraham venue. As an orthodox youngster, we tended to give less credence to Conservative/Reform views. But no one of us would contend that Joachim Prinze was not a compelling advocater for the the Jewish people. The audience at B’nai Abraham was always filled with well over a thousand people and everyone listened with rapt attention. I still remember his “new thesis” of antisemitism post WWII all these many years later. He contended that it was no longer a problem for Jews but something that the larger community should be obliged to solve. Whatever one thinks of him there is no doubt that he was one of the most fomidable personages of his generation.

Simply said; it is for the likes of rabbi Prinz I became a Jew.
I’m sorry so many of my lander jump at the opportunity to criticize and condemn his heart-felt and intellectually astute activism. My dear neo-conservatives (such a nice name for neo-racists), a thought experiment: If German fascism was not anti-Semitic, say, they just wanted Poland and a nice chuck of White Russia, and the concentration camps were an equal extermination opportunity, directed to the loyal opposition: socialists, democrats,dissidents, outsiders, but not Jews in particular, would that have been OK? Please feel free to consider this a test question, and answer for and against.

Dear Mr. Nadler, this was an outstandingly informative piece of journalism about a person all but forgotten by those who do not live in close range of Newark Jewry, thank you very much! I’d be interested to ask how Prinz and A.J. Heschel- both radically engaged in the fight for equal rights-connected? Do you have any information on this?

Thank you for this article. The Jewish Women’s Archive recently launched a new online curriculum — Living the Legacy — on Jews and the Civil Rights Movement(http://jwa.org/teach/livingthelegacy). Rabbi Prinz is featured in the lesson plan on the March on Washington: http://jwa.org/teach/livingthelegacy. If you’re interested in his story, please check out this educational resource.

Although it is not my practice to intervene in comment-discussions on my writings, there are two questions that have been raised that I should like to address:

“Zhid lovksy” wonders why I wrote that the neo-Conservative criticisms of Rabbi Prinz were “not entirely unreasonable” and suggests it was just the opposite. I chose my words carefully here. For all of my admiration of Rabbi Prinz, and it is great, in the aftermath of the Newark riots, he did seem to have a blind spot for the Jewish community’s best interests when it came to his passion — a wonderful passion as I hope I made clear — for human rights. His analogies between the deep south’s treatment of blacks and the Holocaust — although clearly rhetorical in nature — also rankled many Jewish thinkers like Norman Podhoretz and Milton Himmelfarb, as I say, “not unreasonably.” I take no sides here. Prinz in my eyes was a great hero, but he wasn’t perfect.

The other question is more intriguing and merits a serious study; namely the relationship between Heschel and Prinz. Heschel is very well remembered for marching in Selma with Dr. King. He is the Jewish face of the civil rights movement. But he was a prophetic figure; by inclination a mystic. In many respects, Prinz was the very opposite. He had no interest whatever in Jewish mysticism; he was a determined pragmatist and a political thinker. His book, The Dilemma of the Modern Jew is a masterpiece of non-theological thinking about the condition of American Jewry in the 1970’s (I wish it were re-printed; it is a truly great book). In this work, and in his many essays published in the AJC Bi-Weekly, Prinz expressed a deterministic conception of Jewish identity, but one rooted in historical and political reality, not in the kind of metaphysics that Heschel was so enamored of. So, two great rabbis, working from diametrically different angles, for the same great cause: civil rights for American blacks.

Allan Nadler writes:
“His book, The Dilemma of the Modern Jew is a masterpiece of non-theological thinking about the condition of American Jewry in the 1970′s (I wish it were re-printed; it is a truly great book)”

Jews have died for blacks but blacks have never died for Jews. Often it is blacks killing Jews.

There is something so distorted in the way Jews view themselves that they have to help people they deem “the underdog” although they have not yet achieved parity or acceptance by non-Jews. What possesses a Zuckerburg to donate 100 mil to Newark to help black children but not ten mil to help Jews or Israel. Most American Jews are anti-Israel believing our enemies version of Occupied Palestine.

The biggest enemy Jews face is themselves and their fractionalization that the Nazis exploited so well in Europe and Moslems, blacks and anti-Jews exploit so well today. We truly are “The Perfect Enemy” and in spite of all our wealth and fantastic contributions in making this country great we just don’t like each other. I am not embarrassed or ashamed of being a Jew. I am a strong Jew but embarrassed and ashamed of all the weak Jews like Rabbi Michael Lerner and his ilk.

Dear Mr. Nadler, thank you for your answer to my question. Looking forward to an essay on this epic yarn Heschel/ Prinz fighting for American blacks. The two make quite a contrast: the pure of heart mystic and the master orator-womanizer, the Hasid and the very rational Yecke. Add Dr. Martin Luther King with his very human mix of faith and rhetoric gift as well as others strong drives and hope some gifted narrator will soon accept the challenge of retelling this story. In the meantime, again thank you for your comment on the reply.
Friedrich Lersch

In the latest Plot against America is being hatched by the current version of th Klu Klux Klan which the morfed into Southern respectability by becoming the White Citizen Council which Proved so shamefulThat they changed it to the Conservative Citizen Council. Then they became even more respectable because the were “consevative” while still retaining all that bigotry’ Never forget their leader David Duke who went to eastern Europe to stir up trouble’ He traded in his white sheets for his Gestapo uniform

I attended Bnai Abraham Hebrew school from age 9 until my Bar Mitvah. Later, Dr. Prinz officiated at my wedding. I clearly remember that day. He and I were sitting on a bench in the boys’ gym locker room, waiting for the wedding ceremony to begin. Young boys, naked or only with towels around their waists, were laughing and chasing each other about. On the other side of the door were relatives and friends awaiting my entrance. The contrast was unreal, and I was almost paralyzed with anxiety. Dr. Prince must have sensed it, because he turned and asked me, “Jay, are you sure you want to go through with this?” I gulped, gathered myself, and heard myself say, “Yes.” I will never forget his intuitive presence at that moment. He was one of the great men in my life.

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I was one of many of Dr. Prinz’s congregants — just a kid the; he officiated at my Bar Mitzvah — that often confused him with God. That’s how powerful an impression he made. Dr. Prinz’s sorrow over the first signs of Jewish abandonment of the quest for justice for African Americans was remarkably farsighted. Today, the major secular and religious branches of the Jewish-Establishment have no programs that focus on our African-American fellow citizens; instead, they have gone with the most au currant politically-correct fashion and support a bogus “civil rights” movement for illegal Mexican aliens who have no right to here and who steal jobs and drop wages for the most vulnerable American, African Americans among them. I suspect he would be anguished about making a choice, but I have no doubt he would follow the admonitions in the Talmud and seek justice first for those bound to one by ties of kinship, community and nation.

Nice article, except that it skips how Prinz wanted to be a Nazi collaborator in Germany before he was expelled. Prinz said:

“Everyone in Germany knew that only the Zionists could responsibly represent the Jews in dealings with the Nazi government. We all felt sure that one day the government would arrange a round table conference with the Jews, at which –after the riots and atrocities of the revolution had passed– the new status of German Jewry could be considered. The government announced very solemnly that there was no country in the world which tried to solve the Jewish problem as seriously as did Germany. Solution of the Jewish question? It was our Zionist dream! We never denied the existence of the Jewish question! Dissimilation? It was our own appeal!”

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